For several decades the standard material handling systems have employed inexpensive wooden pallets for shipping and warehousing. In such systems the merchandise is palletized at the point of manufacture and delivered to and from the depot or warehouse on wooden pallets using various means to facilitate lifting and transport of the palletized loads including fork lift trucks, pallet jacks, platform trucks and the like.
In a typical material handling system for a mercantile establishment, the boxes or cases containing the merchandise, which are stacked on wooden pallets, are transported in a large truck trailer using a pallet jack to load and unload the trailer. Fork lift trucks or other types of unit load lifters are employed during unloading. In those establishments having a suitable loading dock, a pallet jack is sufficient for the unloading operation.
Pallets have also been used by many large corporations for delivery of advertising material and other goods to bulk mail centers of the U.S. Postal Services. In general the pallet delivery methods employed by the postal system have heretofore been slow and inefficient.
Typical pallet delivery systems used by ordinary mercantile establishments suffer from similar deficiencies. Nevertheless pallet delivery systems of the type mentioned above have for decades been popular and have been considered practical and well suited for transport of goods and merchandise from a depot or warehouse to a retail establishment, such as a supermarket or department store. These pallet systems are in fact slow, inefficient and uneconomical, particularly because of the costs involved in providing storage space at the retail store and in storing the palletized merchanidse until it can be depalletized, sorted, marked and delivered to the retail shelves.
During the last decade, progress has been made in reducing material handling costs at mercantile establishments, but basic problems associated with the pallet systems remained unsolved. For example, some retail stores reduce labor costs by use of special stock systems which facilitate back room processing and shelf stocking. Such systems employ roller conveyers, turntables, wheeled carts, work benches and other special equipment to facilitate depalletizing, cutting, marking, sorting, transporting, aisle processing, and stocking operations. In some systems for retail stores, pallets are brought directly onto the selling floor and positioned at the ends of the aisles. Boxes are then transferred from such pallets to narrow wheeled carts (see U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,782,746 and 4,354,604) from which the merchandise is moved to the shelves after the conventional cutting, sorting, and marking operations. Such prior art cart systems improve productivity at the store but have no effect on the pallet system used to deliver the merchandise to the store.
For several decades it has been recognized that the postal systems in this country and other countries are inefficient and that the cost of delivering mail is excessive. Similar perplexing problems exist in connection with commercial package delivery systems. Although pallets are commonly employed in postal and package delivery systems, there was no reason to suspect that a special pallet-delivery system could solve the basic problems, particularly those of the postal system. In fact the extensive use of cheap or destructible pallets by major corporations using the postal system has created serious problems because of the unreliability of such pallets.